https://doctorow.medium.com/excuseflation-5de795103105
"The decision to pass modest sums out to working people to prevent them from
starving or losing their homes during the covid lockdowns made the right
furious, especially inflation hawks who insist that any improvement in everyday
people’s material lives will transform America into an amateur revival of
Weimar, complete with wheelbarrows full of useless bank-notes.
“Democrats” like Larry Summers — a Clintonite ghoul who is on record as saying
that women are biologically incapable of doing science — insisted that
preserving workers’ living standards was a terrible mistake, only prolonging
the inevitable day when they would be shoveled into the furnace that keeps The
Economy running.
And indeed, the lockdowns were followed by a series of price rises. Some of
these were obviously the result of capacity problems:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/01/factories-to-condos-pipeline/#stuff-not-money>
Cars got more expensive because panicked car executives canceled their
microchip orders. That’s a problem, because they redesigned our cars to be
mobile surveillance platforms stuffed full of anti-repair digital locks, which
means that cars need dozens of chips just to function:
<
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms>
As a result, fully assembled, chipless cars piled up in warehouses around the
world, inert and immobile, awaiting the breath of life to be kindled by
semiconductors. At one point, car makers even bought up
washing machines to
shell them for the chips inside, discarding the husk of the machine:
<
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html>
With fewer cars being made, and some cars being scrapped or retired, there was
more demand than supply, and car prices rose, temporarily. This is obviously a
capacity problem, not a
demand problem. Working people don’t cause capacity
problems.
Bosses do: by selling off buffer stocks, eliminating redundancies
and safety margins, and chasing lax labor and environmental regulations to the
corners of the world, stretching out supply chains across vast distances."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
